Re: Poor Translators

Mike Gifford wrote:
> 1) I don't think the phrase is being used any more as it
> only seems to occur in the locale directory (I updated my
> CVS version & grepped but didn't find it anywhere else).

It is used in the stable branch, file submission.php, line 60.

> This line should be nixed!

Im my humble opinion the I18N of phpSlash sucks. Completely.
It seems that nobody really is responsible for that part.
And that nobody thought about automatizing it.

For example, to find all used keys in .php files:

find . -type f -name '*.php' | xargs ./gettext.pl

Where gettext.pl is this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -nw00
if (m/pslgettext\s*\(\s*([^\)]*)\s*\)/i) 
{ printf "%s\n", $1; }

But there are even more basic things.
A primitive search for duplicate keys:

grep '=>' en.php3 | sort | uniq -d 

reports 11 matches.
Then in file es.php3 we have this one:

  // Luis Mondesi < lemsx1-PkbjNfxxIARBDgjK7y7TUQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > ths => 
this. please fix this!
  "Sorry, ths story is assigned to this topic:" =>
  "Lo siente, este artículo esta asignado a este tema:",

The fix is basically a one-liner (just make the search expression
unique):

find . -type f -name '*.php' | xargs perl -p -i.bak -e 's/ths/this/g'

> 2) It never really occurred to me before (as a unilingual English
> speaking North American), but using slang or casual language like
> the phrase above must be a pain for folks to translate into German,
> Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, etc...

I updated de.php3 this summer (but got ignored).
Anyway, I quickly got used to the casual tone and a quick grep provides
the missing context. What's really bad is the reliance on word order.

A sprintf on %s is good
    "The email address '%s' is not found"

Telegram style with colon at the end is bearable
    "Sorry, ths story is assigned to this topic:"

Concatenating words to build sentences is evil:
    " record deleted"

> As Open Source code matures it is important to use language like
> "Unknown Error" which although it is much more boring is way easier
> to translate and understand.

Sure. But then OSS always starts with version 0.0.1 and improves.
The problem with a clean-up of messages is that trivial changes
cover a large range of files.


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